During January and February, 1965, King and SCLC led a series of
demonstrations to the Dallas County Courthouse. On February 17,
protester Jimmy Lee Jackson was fatally shot by an Alabama state
trooper. In response, a protest march from Selma to Montgomery was
scheduled for March 7.

Six hundred marchers assembled in Selma on Sunday, March 7, and, led by John Lewis
and other SNCC and SCLC activists, crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge
over the Alabama River en route to Montgomery. Just short of the bridge,
they found their way blocked by Alabama State troopers and local police
who ordered them to turn around. When the protesters refused, the
officers shot teargas and waded into the crowd, beating the nonviolent
protesters with billy clubs and ultimately hospitalizing over fifty
people.

“Bloody Sunday” was televised around the world. Martin Luther King called for civil rights
supporters to come to Selma for a second march. When members of
Congress pressured him to restrain the march until a court could rule on
whether the protesters deserved federal protection, King found himself
torn between their requests for patience and demands of the movement
activists pouring into Selma. King, still conflicted, led the second
protest on March 9 but turned it around at the same bridge. King’s
actions exacerbated the tension between SCLC and the more militant SNCC,
who were pushing for more radical tactics that would move from
nonviolent protest to win reforms to active opposition to racist
institutions.

On March 21, the final successful march began with federal protection, and on August 6, 1965, the federal Voting Rights Act
was passed, completing the process that King had hoped for. Yet Bloody
Sunday was about more than winning a federal act; it highlighted the
political pressures King was negotiating at the time, between movement
radicalism and federal calls for restraint, as well as the tensions
between SCLC and SNCC.
- See more at:
http://www.blackpast.org/aah/bloody-sunday-selma-alabama-march-7-1965#sthash.94LxmBDk.dpuf

During January and February, 1965, King and SCLC led a series of
demonstrations to the Dallas County Courthouse. On February 17,
protester Jimmy Lee Jackson was fatally shot by an Alabama state
trooper. In response, a protest march from Selma to Montgomery was
scheduled for March 7.

Six hundred marchers assembled in Selma on Sunday, March 7, and, led by John Lewis
and other SNCC and SCLC activists, crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge
over the Alabama River en route to Montgomery. Just short of the bridge,
they found their way blocked by Alabama State troopers and local police
who ordered them to turn around. When the protesters refused, the
officers shot teargas and waded into the crowd, beating the nonviolent
protesters with billy clubs and ultimately hospitalizing over fifty
people.

“Bloody Sunday” was televised around the world. Martin Luther King called for civil rights
supporters to come to Selma for a second march. When members of
Congress pressured him to restrain the march until a court could rule on
whether the protesters deserved federal protection, King found himself
torn between their requests for patience and demands of the movement
activists pouring into Selma. King, still conflicted, led the second
protest on March 9 but turned it around at the same bridge. King’s
actions exacerbated the tension between SCLC and the more militant SNCC,
who were pushing for more radical tactics that would move from
nonviolent protest to win reforms to active opposition to racist
institutions.

On March 21, the final successful march began with federal protection, and on August 6, 1965, the federal Voting Rights Act
was passed, completing the process that King had hoped for. Yet Bloody
Sunday was about more than winning a federal act; it highlighted the
political pressures King was negotiating at the time, between movement
radicalism and federal calls for restraint, as well as the tensions
between SCLC and SNCC.
- See more at:
http://www.blackpast.org/aah/bloody-sunday-selma-alabama-march-7-1965#sthash.94LxmBDk.dpuf

During January and February, 1965, King and SCLC led a series of
demonstrations to the Dallas County Courthouse. On February 17,
protester Jimmy Lee Jackson was fatally shot by an Alabama state
trooper. In response, a protest march from Selma to Montgomery was
scheduled for March 7.

Six hundred marchers assembled in Selma on Sunday, March 7, and, led by John Lewis
and other SNCC and SCLC activists, crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge
over the Alabama River en route to Montgomery. Just short of the bridge,
they found their way blocked by Alabama State troopers and local police
who ordered them to turn around. When the protesters refused, the
officers shot teargas and waded into the crowd, beating the nonviolent
protesters with billy clubs and ultimately hospitalizing over fifty
people.

“Bloody Sunday” was televised around the world. Martin Luther King called for civil rights
supporters to come to Selma for a second march. When members of
Congress pressured him to restrain the march until a court could rule on
whether the protesters deserved federal protection, King found himself
torn between their requests for patience and demands of the movement
activists pouring into Selma. King, still conflicted, led the second
protest on March 9 but turned it around at the same bridge. King’s
actions exacerbated the tension between SCLC and the more militant SNCC,
who were pushing for more radical tactics that would move from
nonviolent protest to win reforms to active opposition to racist
institutions.

On March 21, the final successful march began with federal protection, and on August 6, 1965, the federal Voting Rights Act
was passed, completing the process that King had hoped for. Yet Bloody
Sunday was about more than winning a federal act; it highlighted the
political pressures King was negotiating at the time, between movement
radicalism and federal calls for restraint, as well as the tensions
between SCLC and SNCC.
- See more at:
http://www.blackpast.org/aah/bloody-sunday-selma-alabama-march-7-1965#sthash.94LxmBDk.dpuf

“Bloody Sunday” on March 7, 1965, when Alabama Governor George Wallace
sent state troopers to attack civil rights protesters crossing the
Edmund Pettus Bridge, and the triumphant march from Selma to Montgomery
that began on March 21 and ended March 25 with King speaking in front of
25,000 people at the state capitol.

Jimmie Lee Jackson, the activist whose brutal murder in nearby Marion
at the hands of law enforcement helped spark the Selma marches.

Vera Jenkins Booker was the nurse who attend Civil Rights martyr Jimmie
Lee Jackson the night he was shot. She also joined the marches and voter
registration drives.

Vera Jenkins Booker was the night supervisor on duty at Good
Samaritan Hospital in Selma, Ala., the night Jimmie Lee Jackson was shot
by an Alabama state trooper who followed him into a restaurant and shot
him at close range as he tried to protect his mother and grandfather.
The date was Feb. 18, 1965, and as those who have seen the movie Selma
already know, it was the first in a chain of events that would focus the
eyes of the world on the brutality of racism. The 26-year-old Baptist
deacon was among those marching in the tiny town of Marionin protest of
the discriminatory voter registration practices of the day; he had
tried unsuccessfully to register for four years, and the struggle
eventually cost him his life.

"He was in so much pain, and when I
pulled up the shirt, that was when I saw a piece of gut the size of a
small grapefruit," Booker recalls. She tended the wound as they waited
for the doctor. "I said, 'You gonna be all right,' and he kinda calmed
down."

She cared for him throughout the week, and through two
surgeries. "He told me he was home from the service, and he said to me,
'I got a little girl, and I'm going to marry her mother.' I said,
'That's the thing to do, marry that little girl.' I was sure he was
going to live."

His death eight days later was the match that
ignited an already smoldering civil rights movement, kindling Bloody
Sunday, the Selma to Montgomery marches, a summer of nonstop protest
around the country, and in August, the passage of the Voting Rights Act.
Those marches are the focus of an ambitious series of anniversary
events in Selma and Montgomery that have already begun. At their peak,
on the March 7 anniversary of Bloody Sunday, President Barack Obama is
scheduled to make an appearance; other big names to help mark the event
include Bernice King, who will be reading her father's seminal "How
long? Not long" speech from the statehouse steps on March 25 in
Montgomery, at the same time and spot as her father did.

The
complicated history has led organizers to cluster the events around
three important events: Bloody Sunday, when the marchers first tried to
cross the Edmund Pettus bridge and were beaten back; Turn back Tuesday,
two days later, when they tried again, met the police and kneeled to
pray; and the week of March 20-25, when a court order and the U.S.
National Guard made a successful march possible. There's lots going on
in both places throughout the months of February and March, but
highlights are clustered in Selma around March 7th, and in Montgomery
around March 20-25. For a complete lineup of events, see their
respective websites: http://selma50iwasthere.com and http://dreammarcheson.com.

"Walking across the Edmund Pettus Bridge is something
every American needs to do; it literally puts you in the footsteps of
history," he said. "When you get to the crest you have to look ahead and
imagine what it would be like to face police with dogs and masks and
teargas. I don't know how many of us would be brave enough to walk into
that but there were people who were."

But what really makes the
place special for a visitor is the people, he said. "You can't go to the
Alamo and talk to someone who fought at the siege; you can't go to
Gettysburg and talk to someone who fought in the Civil War. But you can
go to these places and talk to people who were part of a heroic
movement. There's still people who were foot soldiers, leaders, people
who took part. It's so hard to find heroes in this world that we're in –
and I think these people were heroes."

People like Dr. Gwen Patton,
a diminutive woman of 72 with a razor-sharp analysis, who describes
herself as an archivist-activist. Organizer for the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and
others, she began helping with the voting rights movement at the age of
8. It was around then that her grandparents turned their home into a
citizenship school and began teaching neighbors how to pass the literacy
test. Beginning as a child, she also worked alongside Rufus Lewis, whom
she calls the Father of the Voting Rights Movement, until his death at
93.

"Just to have the courage to go down to register to vote was a
feat in itself, because you knew you were going to be insulted if not
assaulted," she said. "The registrar's office would have a sign out that
said out to lunch – and they really were! – and there were only two
days you could go down and register. It was so arbitrary and so mean."

She
was on the front lines of those marches, and she's quick to point out
that the movement began long before Selma and continues to this day.
"This should not be a celebration; it should be an observance of what
happened in '65 –and that which preceded it to make it possible, and
that which happened afterward to carry it forward."

Like Patton,
Dr. Howard Robinson, archivist at Alabama State University's National
Center for the Study of Civil Rights in Montgomery, was quick to point
out that the battle for voting rights is far from over.

"In 2015
there are still people who are challenging that right –for example the
Voter ID laws and other strategies to reduce the number of people who
are able to vote in the United States. These are 21st century tactics to
reduce the opportunities for people to participate in the political
process, and attacks on the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

"What I
think this celebration is, more than being able to celebrate a past
accomplishment, is a reminder that we are really have to be vigilant
about the right to vote that was established a half century ago."

Jimmie Lee Jackson-Civil Rights Activist (1938–1965)

Jimmie
Lee Jackson was shot and killed by an Alabama state trooper in 1965;
his death inspired a civil rights demonstration that led to the Voting
Rights Act.

Synopsis

Born
in Alabama in 1938, Jimmie Lee Jackson became part of the Civil Rights
Movement as a young man. After participating in a peaceful protest in
Alabama in February 1965, he was shot by a state trooper. He died a few
days later. His death inspired a voting rights march; the violence at
that protest—known as "Bloody Sunday"—made more Americans favor civil
rights, and made it possible to pass 1965's Voting Rights Act.

Early Life

On
December 16, 1938, Jimmie Lee Jackson was born in Marion, Alabama, a
small town located near Selma. After fighting in the Vietnam War and
spending time in Indiana, he returned to his hometown. There, he made
about $6 a day as a laborer and woodcutter. Jackson became a
church deacon—the youngest one at his Baptist church—and fathered a
daughter. Inspired by the Civil Rights Movement, he also tried to vote
for the first time in his life. He made several attempts to register as a
voter, but never got past the many hurdles that had been set up to keep
African Americans from casting ballots.

Shooting and Death

On
February 18, 1965, Jackson took part in a peaceful night march in
Marion, held to protest the arrest of James Orange, a field secretary
for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. However, even
nonviolent demonstrations were opposed by the segregationists who held
power in Alabama. That night, the town's streetlights were turned off;
under the cover of darkness, police and state troopers attacked the
protesters with clubs, sending them fleeing in different directions.

Still
pursued by officers, Jackson and other demonstrators went into a
restaurant called Mack's Café. There, Jackson was shot in the stomach by
James Bonard Fowler, a state trooper. Witnesses recounted that Jackson
had been protecting his mother and 82-year-old grandfather from the
troopers. Fowler claimed he had been acting in self-defense, trying to
keep Jackson from grabbing his gun.

The injured Jackson was first
taken to a local hospital, then sent to a hospital in Selma. He
lingered for a week before dying from his infected wound on February 26,
1965. He was only 26 years old. Though Al Lingo, head of the state
troopers, had sent an arrest warrant to Jackson while he was in the
hospital, Fowler had faced no punishment or disciplinary action, and was
allowed to continue in his job.

Civil Rights Martyr

Jackson's
shooting was condemned by leaders of the Civil Rights Movement such as
Martin Luther King Jr.—who had visited Jackson in the hospital—John
Lewis and James Bevel. On March 3, King spoke at Jackson's funeral,
where he said that Jackson had been "murdered by the brutality of every
sheriff who practices lawlessness in the name of law."

Jackson's
death also inspired civil rights leaders to hold the Selma to Montgomery
March on March 7, 1965. There was a violent response awaiting these
demonstrators as well: When they arrived at Selma's Edmund Pettus
Bridge, police used tear gas and batons against them. Images of the
violence—the protest came to be known as "Bloody Sunday"—were shared
across the country, making the public more supportive of the civil
rights struggle.

Two weeks after "Bloody Sunday," another march
set out from Selma. By the time the marchers arrived in Montgomery,
there was a crowd of 25,000 people. The Voting Rights Act became law in
August 1965. The legislation fought the discriminatory measures that had
kept African Americans like Jackson from voting.